The Confabulator Cafe

Author: ajunge

  • Too Damn Stubborn to Quit.

    Do I ever think about quitting? Every week, particularly as I watch the deadline for these blog posts come roaring down on me like a runaway freight train [0].

    The Plan [1] was to write the first draft of today’s blog yesterday. After all, I was going to be sitting mostly quietly in a room full of voting equipment for twelve hours, it was a primary so we wouldn’t be terribly busy, and what else was I going to do with myself? Heck, I’d write three and get all caught up! [2] I forgot a vital part of my process, which is that I cannot possibly get into the Flow of writing if there is somebody sitting next to me talking. Not necessarily talking to me, not necessarily talking about anything I need to know are am interested about, just talking. Sometimes just breathing loudly is sufficient to throw me off my game.

    And yet I love Nanowrimo writeins. Probably because we spend good blocks of time where we Do Not Talk Just Write (called sprints). And as lovely as my co-election-ladies are, I could not possibly tell them, “OK, I’m going to do a writing sprint! You need to be quiet now!” [3]

    The writing I do for the Cafe is totally voluntary. I don’t have to do it. I have no goals, nothing to prove. I’m not trying to sell myself as an author. If I quit, I doubt I’d so much as lose a friend [4].

    But I would be very, very disappointed in myself.

    (more…)

  • The Dead Will Walk

    Butler’s Pantry — 1918

    The house was finally dark and quiet. The machine-gun-rat-a-tat of the clerk’s typewriter was at long last stilled. Captain Blackwell stared at the sheet of paper before him.

    “18 August, 1918

    “My dear Mrs. Culbertson,

    “It is with heavy heart that I must inform you of the death of Private John William Culbertson today of the influenza. Pvt. Culbertson was….”

    Was what? Blackwell had barely known the lad.

    There was a brisk rap on the door. Blackwell turned to espy Mrs. Lowell, the manor’s housekeeper, holding a tray with tea and a few sandwiches.

    “I thought you might want some refreshment, Captain, seeing how you’re working so hard and so late.”

    (more…)

  • Why I Write

    Because I’m paid for it. In a career that has spanned multiple mighty professions, writing has always turned out to be my most salable skill.

    I work in a space that librarians and search algorithm authors call the Long Tail of Information. Think of it this way— a little bit of information is important to vast quantities of people. How to eat properly. The date of the next general election. The price of tickets to The Dark Knight Rises. After that the graph tapers off pretty sharply. The vast majority of information out there has a very small, but very enthusiastic, audience.

    When I write a report, I’m pulling together data from various sources, online and offline, and repackaging it into a product that is of vital personal importance to anywhere from, say, five to thirty-five people. It may be of casual interest to a couple of dozen or a couple of hundred more. And it will have absolutely no impact on the lives of the other seven and a half billion people on the planet.

    None of this means that this information isn’t valuable! People will use it to make important decisions. Somebody could end up spending a million dollars. Somebody else might or might not get sick. The collective IQ of the planet will increase by an infinitesimal amount. Work will get done. People will get paid.

    And I’m one of them.

  • Don’t Get It “Right,” Get It Written!

    Remember the scene in “Throw Momma From the Train” where Billy Crystal has terrible writer’s block because he can’t decide whether “the evening was hot,” or “the evening was moist?” And later, when Momma suggested “The evening was sultry,” it gave Billy Crystal incentive to actually kill her?

    You can spend hours futzing around like that because you can’t decide on a particular word choice. Or what to name a character. Or whether a particular factoid should be mentioned in Section 2.1 or 3.4. I have wasted hours clicking through photo libraries looking for the perfect illustration.

    Scruit, because time and deadlines wait for no man.

    (more…)

  • Sometimes Complexity is Not Your Friend

    In technical writing you want to avoid writing complexity. Narratives should be as clean and straightforward as possible, without leaving out any important information. Clean and straightforward is particularly important when addressing complicated topics.

    Think how a reader approaches a manual or a report. A very few will read it from front to back. The rest will scan it, trying to pick out needed information without necessarily committing to an in-depth study. This presents particular challenges to document design.

    Because I cannot count on my readers going straight from A to B to C, I find it works well to divide information into chunks. Ideally there will be no more than one fact per sentence, one full idea per paragraph, and once concept per page, or two-page layout, if it needs more room. Supplementary information such as definitions, explanations, and examples can be placed in call-out boxes or sidebars, visually separating them from the rest of the page.

    By chunking information into page-sized pieces, the user can review exactly what they need to know without flipping back and forth (or in the case of screens, scrolling). This also forces me to concentrate on the meat of my presentation, leaving out the clutter of extraneous detail (think of the call-out box as the plastic storage bin of information design).

    I also have to consider document navigation. There should be descriptive headings and subheadings, of course. The table of contents should be comprehensive and reflect the structure of the document. An index must, above all things, be useful. I’ve seen computer-generated indexes that cross-reference every noun in the document, without any indication as to which are the important ones. If necessary, add a glossary of definitions, and if your document is acronym-heavy, a separate list of acronyms and their definitions.

    If your document describes a sequence of actions, such as how to set up a laser-cannon emplacement (first, check area for Ewoks) or how to run a political campaign (first, check constituents for Ewoks), “breadcrumbs” are handy. Breadcrumbs are a visual cue that lets the reader know where they are in the sequence. When the reader is trying to look something up later, they may remember that the information was in the green-tabbed section, or somewhere after Step 2 but before the chafing dishes are removed from the buffet.

    It can be useful to add cross-references when necessary. Don’t feel at all shy about mentioning that the discussion of optimizing pixel size is on page 3-11, and the complete technical specifications of the Wonkaville Golden Ticket are included in Attachment F.

    And lastly, beta readers. One difficulty with technical writing is that the writer has to be come temporarily an expert in the topic, and it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. A fresh beginner’s eye is the only way to identify critical gaps in logic or presentation. I usually tell my beta readers, “Tell me where it sucks, tell me where it’s confusing, tell me what you don’t understand.”

  • Writer’s Block-head

    There are two kinds of writer’s block that I know of, both with the same root. In one, I don’t know enough about my subject to be able to write coherently about it. In the other, I don’t want to write about my subject. The commonality is that I need to do more thinking before I start writing.

    For the first, I’ll start with pad and pencil, and begin free writing everything I know about my subject. What is the story I’m trying to tell? Where are the data gaps? Can I explain around the gaps or do I need to do more research? Does the logic flow smoothly from data to conclusion? If not, do I need to gather more or different data, or do I need to change my conclusion? Do I have the proper references for each fact I assert? My ignorance, once properly documented, is turned into a To Do list of questions to answer, niggling details to attend to, T’s to dot, and I’s to cross.

    If I’m just having a hard time sitting down to work on a piece, it’s often because the back of my brain, which is much smarter than the rest of me, hasn’t quite finished hatching the egg. I can push-start the process by writing the parts that I do know. Physical motion, such as taking a walk to get the blood pumped out of my ass and back into my brain, often helps to grease the cognitive cogs. I will stalk around, muttering darkly, explaining my thesis to myself as though I am a particularly stupid child. Once I am heartily sick of that, I can usually sit down and it’s as easy as taking dictation from myself.

  • A Ghost Story for Pat (Flash Fiction)

    It was one of the first festivals of the season and a time to renew acquaintances and to greet old friends. Most of us hadn’t seen one another since that dreary cold day last winter. The sweet smell of woodsmoke summoned us to perch on camp chairs and coolers and begin to spin yarns from memories and moonshine.

    “I first met Davy, we were in high school together. He was one crazy sonovabitch then, too.” DJ’s booming voice carried easily over the crackle of burning brands. “We used to drag race cars down by the lake every chance we got. Of course, the cops know all about us; they knew our cars, and they’d take any excuse to pull us over whether we deserved it or not. One night the deputy sheriff sees Davy’s car parked along the side of the road. He was sitting there with his girlfriend at the time, just talking, and when the deputy shone his flashlight at them through the window, Davy says to him, ‘Now just hold on there! I haven’t even got her pants off yet!’ He never did have too much respect for cops.”

    “He only had the one girl in there with him?”

    “He mostly only ever had one at a time. He tried dating two at once a time or two, but he always said that was too much work.”

    (more…)

  • Rhyme for a Reason

    I am the first to admit that as an appreciator of art, I am bone lazy. I like my paintings and sculptures pretty, my music melodic, my novels to have plots and sympathetic characters, and my poetry to rhyme.

    Yeah, the nerve of me!

    Each weekday morning I drift into consciousness to Garrison Kiellor’s Writer’s Almanac on NPR. Each morning he reads a poem by a contemporary author. None of them rhyme. What is up with that?

    I’ve been told that rhyme and rhythm are for children and song lyrics. As if Kipling wasn’t writing drinking songs? As if “Banjo” Patterson got his name because nobody in the outback could spell Benjamin? As if Robert Service wasn’t whooping it up to the strains of a ragtime piano himself?

    Poetry was once written to be memorized, recited, spoken aloud, listened to. This was how people entertained themselves and one another while riding the rails as hobos, while crouched over a campfire in the back of beyond, in the officers’ mess of a remote outpost, between decks as the ship pitched in the swells.

    The Iliad, when recited in ancient Greek, scans and rhymes. So do the Canterbury Tales, if you happen to be familiar with middle English. Rhyme and meter are primal. How did we lose them?

    I ran across a great line in a book I read last week. The author was remembering a conversation he had with a college English professor. The professor said that in Dickens’ time great literature was written to appeal to an audience of millions, but today great literature is written to appeal to a few hundred. I say that if only a few hundred get your stuff, you’re doing it wrong.

    Screw artistic pretentiousness— give me something I’ll enjoy.

  • It’s Not About Me

    One of the first and most important lessons I learned about technical writing is that there is no room for ego. Simply put, you cannot get good feedback for your writing— and thus have a chance to improve it— if your beta-readers are afraid you’re going to get all butt-hurt about it.

    I have never sought fame or celebrity or anything other than common respect (and a decent paycheck) for my writing. That drive—to be renowned, to be a Big Name Author—has always seemed to me to be all about ego. That’s not a comfortable place for me.

    For the same reasons, I don’t get all googly about my favorite authors, either. I just buy their stuff, and recommend it to others, and do my little part towards that decent paycheck.

    On rare occasions I’ll be asked to prepare a piece of writing for a non-employment reason— a newsletter article, for example, or this Confabulator Cafe blog— and if I feel up to it and it’s for a cause I want to advance, I’ll do it. Because it’s not about me, or my ego.

  • Grist for the Mill

    One of my favorite professors in library school believed that a good librarian had knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep. He gave us the following advice.

    The next time you go to the library (and if you’re like most Confabulators, your library card is burning a hole in your pocket pretty much most of the time), on the way in the door look at a random license plate. Jigger the numbers and letters around until it looks like a call number. Then go check out that book.

    It works, it really does.

    OK, so you don’t have to read the book cover to cover. But you should at least read the table of contents, the introduction, the first chapter, and the first few paragraphs of each of the other chapters. If you find something that interests you, read a bit more deeply. If not, feel free to skip. But try to take away at least the gist of the book.

    If you find yourself at a newsstand or in a waiting room, read a magazine you would never have considered looking at in your ordinary life. Or find a random blog and read a few posts.

    See, we all get into ruts. This is what I’m interested in; that is boring. Sometimes it takes just a little nudge to get you out of your comfort zone and open up whole new realms of ideas and associations.

    You will be amazed at how useful all those random little bits of information become.